Look around your sales organization: you are witnessing the largest coexistence of generational gaps taking place right in front of your eyes. We are apart of a reality where a 22 year old sales rep is selling to a 55 year old VP and being managed by everyone in between. Baby Boomers and Millennials were born in completely different realities, yet are still required to come together and produce organizational value.

How your employees work, play, and communicate are so far different that failing to bring them together puts your sales team’s productivity at risk. This is an issue that no sales process or automation software can sweep under the rug for you. Here are 3 ways to overcome the generational gap plaguing your sales organization.

1. Identify Gaps and Promote Strengths

Just as firefighters don’t run into a flaming building without a plan, you can’t make organizational change without one. Rather than focusing on generational negatives (millennials are considered impatient, disloyal and overly indulgent in technology while Boomers and Gen X are seen as slow to change and too bureaucratic) focus on the strengths of each to promote performance.

Give me something concrete to do:

1. Identify Gaps- Find time for your employees to read up on what perceptions people have about their generation. An HR Hero post quickly summarizes key generational differences. Another informative chart is from little known family center WMFC.org. Big players in the game are taking notice of this. A WSJ post found that Ernst and Young, IBM and Lockheed Martin all building ways to educate employees on generational gaps.
2. Pull Strengths - Understand that each generation has a proven skillset to bring to the table. Millennials are adaptive, creative and ruthlessly flexible. Baby Boomers are loyal, hard working and operate well in highly structured environments. Just as millennials need to reduce their social media consumption and multi-task less, boomers can take note and get up to speed on technology and be more adaptive to change. This brings us to our next point below.

2. Connect People with Mentoring

Begin to form bonds across groups at a small and personal level. Establishing a mentor program will allow your younger recruits to understand and appreciate the work of those far above them in the management chain. Forbes found that over 5 years at Sun Microsystems, Mentors were 6x more likely to have been promoted to a bigger job and mentees were promoted 5x more than peers without a mentor. When people connect with those above and below them, they are able to manage and be managed with skill unknown to others.

Where do I even start?

1. Good question. Starting a mentoring system is hard and maintaining one that actually drives value can be even harder. The important thing to remember is that you want your employees gaining the perspective and guidance of those from a background different from their own.  Inc.com has a fantastic post on evaluating and beginning your mentor process. 

3. Draw out Similarities

Comparing Boomers to Millennials may seem like comparing apples to oranges, but that is surprisingly far from the truth. Ben Rosen, PHD and Professor Organizational Behavior at UNC Chapel Hill, found that these different generations all have similar expectations and needs of their employer. These included: challenging work projects, competitive pay, advancement, fair treatment and a resemblance of work-life balance. This is brilliant knowledge to have. Beneath surface level differences, these generations all value the same organizational goals. Boost performance by aligning the values of ALL your employees rather than simply working at a surface level.

Give me something concrete to do:

1. Evaluate - Are your employees happy with the projects and work assigned to them? You may believe that they are not, but for the wrong reasons. Evaluate your company’s ratings from both internal employees and outside sources. A breakdown of internal communication between the young and old may very well hold its roots in a mutual dissatisfaction with their working environment.

Keeping up with trends will have you think that technology will solve all of our problems, but technology is nothing without people. How we interact, communicate and work together should be at the forefront of organizational strategy. Addressing growing generational gaps is one way to do just that.